


paint your world with shards of glass

by silveryspring



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst, HOW DO YOU TAG THINGS, Implied health issues, M/M, doctor yuta and artist taeyong, i had to add a cat, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 11:36:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17120618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveryspring/pseuds/silveryspring
Summary: your self-portrait is where you turn to find yourself, darling.





	paint your world with shards of glass

**Author's Note:**

> tbh it's just 3k+ of me wanting to write about colors. may or may not intentional vagueness, i'm sorry. i had fun writing it though, and i'd be honoured if you like it too 
> 
> i'll have you know that i finished this with the power of comic sans

Colours running down the white walls. Colours running everywhere, thinly, distinctly. Blues that captures new meaning like a sky-coloured lens, gripping the world, holding it, and imbibing it. Shallows of colours too deep to be treated upon. Oh, not shallows. Depths. Oceans of clarity in tiny, pigments streams of paint.  
  
Young doctor Yuta has always had the keenest eye for color.  
  
“Taeyong, are you sleeping late?” the doctor whispers, the clatter of the door long since behind him, and before his patient sits the most beautiful creature he’s ever laid eyes on, as if observing his life has left Yuta blind to his own; sickly and unrelenting, pale and colorless, so unlike paint that Taeyong cannot paint him. Colorless, lightless, opaque. A stain of absence to retrain his eyes from the wall.  
  
“Sleep?” The artist defers, chapped lips slackened with a sleepless - but never dreamless - disposition, eyes trailing across the ceiling, tracing the paintings that were never there. “I feel as if I am still there, wandering on sky-lit pathways. Does the sky make its own color, or do our eyes place it there?”  
  
To which the doctor would laugh, and the homeliest cat he’s ever seen hopping up onto his patient’s bed, settling between his knees. A patchwork of brown and black fur, bald patches more prominent than its mane at times, and one of its eyes missing, plucked from the head many years ago like gold from a river bed; perhaps an accident, a fight, or a terrible fall, maybe the artist doesn’t know himself. The pills, white and without hue, would clatter between the doctor’s fingers like a collection of skulls, not so much in hue but in a pretense of action, to be buried beneath the ground, unseen and undisturbed.  
  
“Dear Taeyong, my most optimistic artist --” A smile will always be received at these words, these false deceptions. How sweetly the doctor would pretend to know his patient well enough, how colorlessly, and how full of color he’s become when he reaches deep within himself and finds an expression, one that speaks of all the candor bereft in their epithets. “That is not the sky, but the ceiling.”  
  
Lee Taeyong takes the medicine and feels every ounce of color condense on the ceiling, gather itself into droplets of paint, and drip, drip, drip away.

//

But the irksome reflections remained. Like some phantom drifting through the hallways, the doctor appears, watching his face slide from one rectangle to the next, a voyeur looking into window panes of the unreal, a majestic, glittering thief of reflected imagery. A stinging aroma, the scent of --

“Taeyong?” The doctor whispers, but in the reflections, it is a scream. “My dear?”

The ghost in the rectangular turns on one heel now, and a floorboard creaks, revealing the slightest hint of lips trembles from the lovely apparition, a doctor who is just as real as flesh, bone, and creation itself. A name rests on the edge of his lips, and the ghost of his, shining in mirror beyond, anticipates its fall.

A scuffle from the bedroom.  
  
Yuta’s footstep continued.  
  
“My most stubborn and impetuous adversary, Taeyong,” The doctor recites like the beginning of a limerick, eyes dancing somehow, reveling in the eccentricity of the artist. “It took me a long time to get to know your name, but now it seems you refuse to be addressed again.”  
  
“You’re just too loud.” The artist smiles, the sound rattling from within his chest somewhere, stifled by the stillness of his lips, a strange muffle. "And your choice of hue – far too saturated today."  
  
Yuta glances at his white blouse, and his gray sweater hangs over his shoulders like a sheen of confusion.  
  
“For too ever-present.”  
  
"Your intellect is dizzying."  
  
“My darling,” the whisper breaks through his confinement of doubt, “did you know that if you were to wear a single shade of green – even in the mildest of tones – it would light up the entire room?"  
  
The doctor’s eyes untangle themselves from the wool of his sweater, abandoning those loops and circles, those stitches without number, and found themselves tied to the artist before him, a man with a house full of mirrors.  
  
"… But you, you are not one for evergreen," the artist’s smile brightens, knowingly, but it does not physically grow larger, only from somewhere deep within, and the doctor aches for the ghosts of hidden memories. “And violet would be too wayward for you…” Silence still, Yuta’s eyes collapse within Taeyong’s, lost in black, a world so full of color that it could not have been black, not truly, the color of his eyes his eyes is the veriest of untruths. A world without breath tries to respire between them, but it’s all dependent upon his words. “But for you, darling, I have a shade with the perfect meaning.”  
  
The artist slips away from the other, words having completed themselves with an emotionlessly heart-felt vigor, a contrivance of contradiction. And he faces the quick-silver on the wall.  
  
“Your medicine…” The doctor mutters, but Taeyong stands without motion, resolute and unmoving, a phantom, too, but frozen patiently in a world with more colors than time. The pills feel warm in Yuta’s hand, palpable, untouchable, indigestible.  
  
They clatter to the floor, and he leaves.  
  
/  
  
It is the scent of –  
  
But what ís the scent of colors, anyway? Breath by breath, inhale turning into exhale, one may find it impossible to decipher hue based on unlearned senses alone. A new mirror in Taeyong’s home today, longer than the others, the bottom of the frame level with the doctor’s knees, but the top inching just above Yuta’s head. The cat, old and slow, bumps into his legs upon turning too quickly, croaking a quick sound of surprise. The cat’s head feels texture-less and comforting beneath his fingers, warm somehow in a land of sensory deprivation, and bright amber eyes shown up at the doctor like a malformed, Greek beast would stare at an aurora.  
  
“Upstairs?”  
  
A quick meow, something aged and worn.  
  
“Painting, right? Frantically or methodically?”  
  
Nothing. No longer aged, no longer worn. Not a single sound to carry these attributes.  
  
The doctor’s feet clattered up to the stairs so quickly that he feels his skeleton, colorless and bland, threaten to crumble.  
  
/  
  
“I will not paint!” - oh, Taeyong doesn’t scream. Perhaps he could have if he wanted to. A sharp cough gives his words more volume than he intended.  
  
“I will have none of it! Show me your face, darling, whoever you are, whoever you choose your name to be. Allow it to reveal itself clearly!”  
  
“My dear, my name has always been my name, it has always been Yuta,” a bit shaken now, a bit taken aback now. The artist’s hand flies up toward his head as if he’s summoning every bird from the heavens, directing them south. “Please Taeyong, please sit down.”  
  
“And for what purpose, my doctor? For treatments of an unknown sort for an ailment just as feebly understood?" Wild eyes, feverish, warm, scalding, boiling over; and Yuta imagines that Taeyong ’s tears would have flooded the entire bedroom if they had not evaporated from the scalding heat. A face that is the color of madness. Frighteningly so. “To blind even inner sight from coming forward?”  
  
“Please, the fever has you.”  
  
“No, it has nothing.” His voice breaks like an ancient teacup in a storm. "Does it grip me like childish trickery, like knavish deceit, like you?" He grips Yuta’s arm. Pushes the other backward. Does not let go. The mirror behind Yuta is unbearably cold, and the phantom behind him feels frozen and displaced, slamming the world of the real with his spin. Pressed tightly. Shaking. Unable to shake. Unable to move. Quicksilver notions of…  
  
Trembling lips attempt to speak.  
  
"No, no words. I've had enough." The artist’s voice is a hoarse, low echo. He plucks something from a stand next to his visitor, but the other cannot even see it, cannot conceive of anything in these moments, not even safety. Taeyong is mad, and his madness is a pulling, horrible tide - “Reveal the color you hide so delicately” -- and he forces the brush into Yuta’s shaking hand.  
  
“Dear, there is water on the nightstand…" For painting? For swallowing medicine?  
  
"Why do you say this?"  
  
The artist feels the tiniest shells of white slip into his free palm, their textures cold and without remarkable pigment; Yuta’s words are here, and he feels them more than anything, sees them in every color, watches them drain away every shade. Feels them as he sinks to the floor, tears winding down his cheekbones, making it impossible to breathe; feels them everywhere, sees them and hears them and falls between them. The pills slide down his throat only moments after the words out of his companion’s, pooling in the air with unrelenting softness, sweetness, and inward reproach, staining the morning with;  
  
"… Because you frighten me."

/

Cracks appear on the mirror behind Yuta. Taeyong has left it there, letting it hang, crooked and off center, a world cast away and uneven. And endless catastrophe of 'I'm sorry's' are shouted in the endless silence of him, the drugged colorlessness, the coolness. No more fever, it has evaporated, been chilled. A frost picture of medicinal belonging encircles his crown.

Taeyong sits by his bed, the cat purring at his feet, watching his lips move in relentless onslaughts of, "Forgive me."  
  
"There is nothing to forgive, silence."  
  
"Forgive me."  
  
"Only if you cease these apologies."  
  
"Forgive me."  
  
Yuta scowls in reply, an expression that fadé quickly as his eyes trail toward the broken mirror, an array of pink -- pink? Oddly enough? A pattern as well? - revealing itself beneath, estranged in a monochromatic, bromidic world.  
  
Taeyong is an artist -- the doctor scans the room - but there are no paintings to be found, no compositions, no signs of creativity. Blank easels, quicksilver covered hallways.  
  
The hallways, the rectangles of silver, the…  
  
“Why do you hide your paintings behind mirrors?” The doctor asks, and his voice is soft and fluid, filled with amnesty and light and empathetic pink.  
  
A gaze that wanes in cycles and tides, drifting like the reflection of the moon over salt water, illuminating somewhere, but only in the darkest and most unknown of places -- it becomes the artist immediately. "Because no one ever looks past the surface."  
  
"Of the mirrors?"  
  
"Of anything."  
  
/

Self-hatred is biting and wretched. When he looks in mirrors, does he feel anything other than self-disgust, self-containment, self-imprisonment? A stroll through the hallway becomes a Roman gauntlet, an instrument of torture screaming of his handsome face.

“My dear,” Yuta whispers one evening when the sun is drowning in its own red currents, too weak for its own tides, and the artist’s face, without flaw or aesthetic restraint, is curving into the most sympathetic forms of sadness. "You are stunning.”

The doctor watches Taeyong bite the inside of his lip a little harder. Something inside him is shaking. He’s seated on the bed, eyes drawn across the floorboards, anticipating rain, hands curled into themselves, an imaginary embrace. Cold whispers, regretful tones. "I know."  
  
Dedition then? An injury to one's self? – but no, the drawing room remains cold and empty and his living room unfulfilled, mirrors hanging like waning moons, light dripping toward the edges instead of bouncing back.  
  
The young doctor’s hands pull toward the mirror on the far wall, tugging his own body with them, the grass outside lightly bending with the nuance of wind, spinning shadows and lines. Slowly, those hands descend. The crack in the mirror, the sharp edges. Oddly jagged in a smooth, resigned way. Accepting. The words fall without realization; "You've never painted a self-portrait."  
  
"No."  
  
"Why?"  
  
Taeyong's eyes are dark, bottomless and colorless, lenses so keen lending every individual shade that they keep none for themselves, remain settled on the old, dark wood beneath his feet.  
  
"I believe you should," his companion suggests in a moment of brightness, one hand trailing to beside the mirror, grasping the brush the other has so readily forced into his hands only days before, "And show me what colors lay inside of you."  
  
The artist looks up, “And lie?”  
  
A gentle laugh coils about the Yuta's neck like a halo. "No, I don't believe you've ever done that when you reveal what is carefully hidden within all things. I've seen them, dear artist. Hidden behind the mirrors, the scent of color filling the dining room… I've looked, and I hope you don't mind. I've seen them. They're an intricacy that ought not to remain shuttered away."  
  
And every mirror could have fragmented in perfidy as the host elevates his gaze, silently beckoning, needing consolation as he asks one desperate task of his visitor, and that is to only "Look again."

/

Down the stairs the visiting doctor floods. Down, down through the mirrored corridor of quicksilver ghosts that imprisons bats of the most compassionate nature; of people dancing with horrifying beasts and goblins; of skeletons taking tea with fairies, laughing with them, unashamed. Ugly things, horrifying things – beauty that will remain forever hidden beneath the surface because no one dares to look there, beneath the mirrors, beneath anything.  
  
Then the cracked mirror, the one the doctor dares not look beneath, for fear that the glass will tremble as Taeyong’s dark eyes would, quake as his hands would, and break like his fever would have, could have, should have long ago, had only Yuta kept making him take those pills…  
  
Yuta’s hands reunite with the frame of the cracked mirror. Slowly, unsure of themselves, they slide upward across the dark wood that held his phantom image, the face of a pale man beaming back at him, a frosted picture written across glass perhaps, her coat a drab gray and his skin so white that it looks sickly.  
  
Upward…  
  
Upward to the corner of the frame where they pause quite unsurely, where the scent of dried paint, like a rose garden, is in full bloom. Soft presences… Slow presences… How colorless he is, mild and unaccented. The artist is nearby, and he can feel it.  
  
Perhaps Taeyong knows that the mirror will come crashing to the floor, shattering like a cannonball striking water, Yuta’s breathing freezes mid-way through – has Taeyong already heard it? Is it there, beneath him, inside of him, beneath the surface of him all along?  
The mirror slides away. It reconciles its defeat in silver fragments all around Yuta. But his face is still reflected. Reflected there, beyond that rectangle of silver, where it is, in what is beneath it. The pink, the colors, the wonder…  
  
"Monochromatic, my dear." The whisper comes from beyond him, hovering over his shoulder, a voice so familiar that it belongs there now, has never truly left. "You were never one who was adorned with brilliant shades. Grays, whites, rarely a soft blue…" His eyes were wide, but Taeyong’s, in their closed sincerity, are wider. "Perhaps all of your colors lies inward."  
  
Taeyong has painted Yuta in the most royal of pinks, cheeks flushed with healthy color, hair shining like a sunset, eyes glistening with a secret finally revealed.  
  
///

"You hate your reflection because it's beautiful,” The doctor whispers, night coating the sky ubiquitously, and Taeyong’s body strewn over the bed like a piece of stray linen, weariness loosening his tongue. Beneath the mirror, Yuta is a brilliant shade of rose, above it, chamomile grey. “For what is on the surface rarely mirrors what is inside.”

“Yes,” Taeyong finally reveals. The oil lamp lights him like a nest of fireflies, the word spinning once more in repetition. “Yes.”

"The colors you lend, the worlds you paint," Yuta words drifts somewhere over him like a forgotten sensation. "You could never paint yourself because you could not imagine something so hideous."  
  
Wordlessness. Soundlessness. Even the cat sleeps on. The dame persists. "How could you think that?"  
  
"You have gazed past the surface and seen pieces that no one has seen, embraced what I have shown you, but you are always questioning…" A body claimed by fatigue loses none of its conviction – "Questioning as I always am, about what lies beneath, above, and ahead."  
  
"Past the surface."  
  
"Of everything."

//

Yuta painted Taeyong’s portrait, and the artist shrieked in agony.

Could have shrieked, would have shrieked, but there is no sound louder than the impenetrable silence within his throat.  
  
Then a smile breaks, then a laugh, then a steady stream of tears as he buries his head into Yuta’s shoulder, realizing what the other has done, that clever doctor, that beautiful doctor, with those hands that seem forever dedicate and bereft of pigment.  
"Your arms without cuts," Yuta whispers, watching Taeyong’s eyes carefully as the artist pulls away, his sleeve rolling up so easily, his skin shining without devastation. "Your body without abuse," Taeyong’s heart slams against Yuta’s hand as he presses it there, feeling that slight pressure, remembering every beat. "That manifested itself only beneath the surface, far too deep, hidden far too within."  
  
"… You placed the portrait atop of the mirror."  
  
"I did," Yuta whispered, head falling against Taeyong now, resting on the apex of his ribcage, those angel wings of bone; the beat of his heart gives them life, sings of the wind. "The surface is the portrait, a painting of suffering. Beneath it…"  
  
"… Beneath it," Taeyong looks at Yuta, he’s truly looking at Yuta now, and sees the light that he didn’t think existed, not even in art. Monet could not have invented it, nor Picasso. His doctor shows like Calypso's tears on the isles of Ogygia tossed between the waves and beckoning towards a distant homeland. "Is what you have always wished for me to see, the true nature of things, what I have always concealed from myself, and would have never revealed, not truly, not artistically…"  
  
"Yourself, "Yuta whispers. Not a single wave on the distant shore crashes; no bird cries; the wind stills and the grass refuses to weave shadows any longer. "And what truly lies within you. The beauty of your own reflection."

//

The fever will take Taeyong days later. It will leave him across the floor, the pills he should have taken trembling in Yuta’s outstretched hand, and Yuta will beg him to take them, take them all, swallow them, free him from the guilt of neglect.  
  
"I had never intended this!" Yuta says, horrifyingly. "They robbed you of your inner sight, the colors, the warmth…" His body is shaking now, more so than the pills, his heart barely pumping blood through his veins in its frenzy. "The fever would stay – worsen, somewhere I knew this – but you were so helplessly afraid of them, so attached to your inward worlds, your paintings…" His throat constricts, Yuta is on his knees. "Forgive me, Taeyong. Forgive me and all of my trespasses that have led to this end!"  
  
Taeyong is whirring. His eyes, gliding silently across the ceiling, know only color. "I have always wanted to paint this room. Or perhaps unveil my paintings here, and rid them of their mirrors. Do you think this suitable?"  
  
Taeyong’s delirium is driving Yuta discomposedly mad, every silver square reflecting contrition, the two ghosts in each frame so unlike the characters in a fairy tale. "Hardly," Yuta replies, eyes draining, skin paling. It is breathless and quiet, falling like the wind over a chasm. "My decent, wondrous, silly Taeyong. Take these pills at once."  
  
The artist refuses. “Color would be wonderful in this room, but darling, my dearest Yuta,” There is concern in Taeyong’s voice now, a substance so cutting that it slices through his own fantasy, tearing his daydreams. "It seems that you have lost yours; your face… Paler than I have ever seen. Has there been a death?"  
  
Sobs tear through the bedchamber, over every painting and every mirror, and through the young doctor seats upon the floor, a ghost, a phantom, and nothing more. "Oh, it always has been dead. Make no mistake regarding this, for I've seen nothing else, and deny any chance to provide further opportunity. Dead, my love. It's always been dead. Deader than the skeletons you paint and the graves you emblazon with color are the insights and curiosity of the people. So long gone are they that you could paint them without nostalgic fondness. Dead... their mourners light no more candles with artistic whim...they have long since passed away."  
  
Empty the room of even silence, now. The sunlight sways from its balcony in the sky, holding them dearly, trying to whisper with even a fragment of life. Fires burn low and the mirrors reflect onward, but only for a lack of anything better to do, holding their travail in fleeting memory.  
  
Yuta lies next to Taeyong on the floor, pale blue coat sprawled across the boards, a puddle of false color bathing their limbs in sky. "They will never understand this night."  
  
And the artist whispers his last, eyes full of budding empathy, not for their cause but for those who remain in a place of societal disdain and misplaced apprehension, "Because no one ever looks past the surface. Not of the mirrors…"  
  
The pills in Yuta’s hand shine like the last of his fragmented words, his tears still spilling forth as his lungs rejected their last bout of air, letting it fly away – and he knows that his doctor’s lips are parted expectantly, returning his words.  
  
"Not of anything."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is like my firsts of many. first time to write colors, first time to write death. first times to try this style. 
> 
> find me on cc


End file.
